The Motorcycle Diaries By Walter Salles

684 Words3 Pages
“The Motorcycle Diaries”, directed by Walter Salles describes Ernesto’s experience during his nine month journey through South America. Ernesto Guevara, a good man who displays great exuberance as a kind doctor, turns into a harsh Marxist revolutionary, due to witnessing horrible conditions for peasants in his motorcycle journey through South America. Ernesto Guevara is born to a half Basque and half Irish middle class family in Buenos Aries. He has access to a wide variety of books, but Guevara is particularly interested in philosophy. He is interested with Karl Marx, and his ideals of armed revolution. Guevara’s father credits his son’s restless nature to his Irish rebellious roots. With age, Guevara developed more interest in Latin American…show more content…
There he is able to meet lepers and hear about their distresses. The journey only is 2,800 miles. Due to working for the Argentine National Shipping Company, Ernesto is still able to visit other countries, where he could visit Brazil and Venezuela. The real expedition that changes Ernesto’s life would not be until two years later when he and Alberto Granado would traverse the Latin American Pacific to Venezuela, and then to Miami. They cross into Chile on February 14, where they got to see real poverty. Unable to catch a boat to Easter Island, Ernesto and Alberto have to travel north where they come across the Chautauqua copper mine. Ernesto is enraged at the treatment of the poor mine workers by the US run capitalist company. They also meet a Communist couple, ousted out of their home and forced to find work in the desert. This also infuriates Ernesto, with this Ernesto’s political exuberance begins to grow larger and larger. With the motorcycle completely ruined, Ernesto and Alberto are forced to continue their trekking of Latin America on foot. Alberto later…show more content…
In Peru, Guevara is introduced to a new form of poverty. Not economic ostracization by political affiliation, but by ethnic affiliation. He sees a once great Inca civilization being trampled on by wealthy landowners who could kick the indigenous people off their land at will. Guevara sympathises heavily with the local proletariat populous, and when he met a Peruvian, Marxist scientist, they connect almost immediately. Che Guevara would later say that these meetings and discussions would play an important role in evolving his Communist views. Ernesto and Alberto were able to go to the leper colony of San Pablo, in the Peruvian Amazon. After spending weeks at the colony, Che had his famous speech about a unified Latin
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